Tell us about your favourite historical scientist

I'll start with Amalie Noether, sometimes referred to as "Emmy" She was a gifted (to put it lightly) mathematician and the first to properly understand General Relativity in a full mathematical context. By the time she had finished, she understood General Relativity better than Einstein and Lorentz ever had. Noether's Theorem is one of the most fundamental statements in all of physics. Before Noether, General Relativity was suspected to be a solution to a problem Einstein has created himself with Special Relativity. After Noether, it was accepted by everyone.

In it, she proved invariances, mass equivalencies, conservation laws and other utterly fundamental concepts of physics by building off the Lorentz transforms. Before Noether, these concepts were "just how physics works", with some equations relating them, but nothing solid. She provided a logical, intuitive mathematical reasoning as to why conservation laws were a necessary consequence of symmetries. Noether proved them to be fundamental and immutable and did so with a rich, understandable underpinning of sound mathematics. Noether's Theorem is the closest we have yet come to unifying quantum mechanics with general relativity, the holy grail of physics.

The theorem shows that every definable symmetry has a corresponding conservation law, which has far-reaching consequences still being researched today, and despite being based around General Relativity, provides the initial framework from which the Standard Model of quantum mechanics was derived. Noether's Theorem doesn't just prove these concepts, but provides an intuitive, understandable foundation for them so that other scientists could take her work and build from it. She may just be the most important physicist who ever lived, despite being foremost a mathematician.

Grace Hopper developed the first compiler for a High Level computer language; she developed the idea that there could be a compiler of a human like language for programming computers and that it should be machine independent.

She had the idea that a computer language could have a formal definition and led a committee to provide one.

Grace Hopper was the first person hired as a computer programmer in the US, for the Harvard Mark I. (She was not the first computer programmer, just the first to be hired as a computer programmer)

She handed superiors a 30 cm pieces of wire she called a nanosecond to explain to them why satellite communications would not get faster.

Despite being denied admittance (twice) to the US Navy for being too old, she retired at 79 after 42 years; she was the oldest serving officer in the US Navy at that time.

Some Hopper Quotes:

From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. … They carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs.

If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.

Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, "We've always done it this way." I try to fight that.

You manage things, you lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership.

A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question.